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One of the strengths of Baumbach’s screenplay (from a story he co-wrote) is that incidental characters are allowed to make their mark even if they only appear for a scene or two, never to return. From the random dudes sitting outside their dorm debating whether it’s preferable to be a cowfucker or to have lost one’s mother, to Amy, the freshman Grover goes home with as one of his post-Jane rebounds, there are no small roles, just a rich vein of observational (and occasionally absurdist) humor.

Even though this is a "dude" film that in some ways might be considered the '90s prologue to the rise of the bromantic comedy in the last decade, the females in the film, though they may inhabit the stereotypical role of the girlfriend or love interest, are all given fleshed out parts, and the actresses - D’Abo, Parker Posey, Cara Buono, Perrey Reeves, even a blink and you’ll miss her Marisa Rabisi - are allowed to be quirky and human instead of unattainable ideals. (This is apparent even in an offhand moment, such as Amy’s sweater getting briefly stuck over her head as she attempts to strike a seductive pose on Grover in her dorm room.) Time and again, it is also the ladies who accurately call bullshit on the men’s “circle jerk” of pop culture driven conversations, manufactured crises, and refusal to pick themselves up out of the rut they have fallen in to.

I also enjoyed Elliot Gould’s extended cameo as Grover’s dad when I was younger, but now as I myself am in fatherhood, I look at his performance with new appreciation for the emotions he casts on his relatively reined in face, regaling his horrified son with stories about how hard it is for him as a divorcee at 56, dealing with the dating scene, and using condoms once again. Gould is about the only other adult in sight and even though the film is sympathetic to his plight, there is a hint of a messy divorce just off-screen, one tinged with the echoes of the real-life dissolution of Baumbach’s parents’ marriage, which he also mined for far more brutal laughs in The Squid and the Whale.

But the heart of the film is in its dialogue, in the way, familiar to many a collegiate, that words are used both as an expression of superiority and/or self-ridicule, and more importantly, are used to keep the impending adult world at bay just a little while longer. I could pull any two minute sequence at random that would showcase Baumbach’s ability to deftly blend high laughs with low laughs and yet always find a rueful truth hidden just underneath or off to the sides of the laughs. Chet (Stoltz) the eternal graduate student and preferred bartender/father figure/sage to the quartet of grads has found a way to turn his never-ending pursuit of his Ph.D. in to a full-time profession. But even he acknowledges that such a path “is not for everyone.” And Kicking and Screaming traces the alternate path that Skippy, Otis, Max, and Grover must take outside of their ivy-colored walls.

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